Abstract

Population ageing is among the most pressing challenges of the 21st century in Europe. Addressing this challenge scientifically demands an infrastructure of micro data of the changing health, economic and social living conditions of individuals as they go through the ageing process.

SHARE, the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe, is an infrastructure of multidisciplinary, longitudinal, and cross-nationally harmonized micro data that has been created in response to these demands. Currently, SHARE contains two waves of data for about 32,000 respondents aged 50+ in 17 European countries. SHARE became a great success: More than 2300 researchers are working with the data, and SHARE has been elected to be one of the future ESFRI infrastructures. This project is the essential device to enhance the longitudinal stability of the SHARE panel and to improve access and consulting services to users in the years 2009 and 2010.

It will:

enhance the longitudinal stability of the panel by keeping in touch with the panel members, monitoring moves, re-interviewing lost panel members, and ascertaining last year of life events of deceased panel members. The scientific value of SHARE critically depends on continuous panel care.

improve the research potential from the SHARE infrastructure by adding imputed values for missing variables, calibrated weights, geo-coded and environmental variables, and meta/para-statistics derived from IT-driven survey methods.

enhance the SHARE survey instrument in response to user feedback, to changes in the institutional environment, and to new survey technologies recently developed, making the interview more effective and less burdensome for the respondents. Such enhancements need to be implemented in 2009/early 2010 to be in time for the ESFRI-financed fourth wave of data collection.

improve and maintain the much applauded user-friendly access for SHARE data users through services provided by central and national support points.